Microsoft & .NETASPBuilding a Webpart to Display a Virtual Earth Map

Building a Webpart to Display a Virtual Earth Map

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Necessary Components and Setup

The items you will read about in this article came about as a result of some project work that I’ve been doing for the Indianapolis Colts. I’ve been helping to lead efforts to build and launch myColts.net, a social networking site for Colts fans. I got in to a discussion at the Microsoft MVP summit around the idea of a mashup, which is about using multiple online services to create a new one; that inspired me to play around with Virtual Earth.

The webpart display in the example relies on the native functionality contained within ASP.NET. For the purposes of this article, I’m not going to go in to all of the background setup that took place to get the web site set up to display webparts. Rather, I’m going to assume that the readership already has a site setup that will display a webpart. Worst case, you could just as easily toss the webpart portion and put the code in a page instead.

Microsoft Virtual Earth

Figure 1: Webpart Display with Map

Summary

This month’s column covered how to build a webpart to display a map produced from Microsoft Virtual Earth. It used an HttpHandler to produce the RSS feed format to drive Virtual Earth. It can appear daunting at first, but hopefully, as you’ve seen, it is pretty straightforward when you break down the individual parts of the solution.

Future Columns

The topic of the next column is yet to be determined. If you have something in particular that you would like to see explained here, you could reach me at mstrawmyer@crowechizek.com.

About the Author

Mark Strawmyer, MCSD, MCSE, MCDBA is a Senior Architect of .NET applications for large and mid-size organizations. Mark is a technology leader with Crowe Chizek in Indianapolis, Indiana. He specializes in the architecture, design, and development of Microsoft-based solutions. Mark was honored to be named a Microsoft MVP for application development with C# for the fourth year in a row. You can reach Mark at mstrawmyer@crowechizek.com.

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